Saturday, December 19, 2015

Post number one thousand. The last few, the hardest. Adrift. I had to consult my interviews, wondering if it was all worth it, the attempt to explain, if that's what it was, to catch how people talk, how they think.

When you do a tree pose...

That's the figure of the Christ brought to three dimensional reality I like to think of. The tree pose is balance, in yoga, alignment, standing on one foot, and when you part your arms out straight, like the cross, there's an additional shift of the things of the body into place.

The tree pose of yoga comes close to the mythical meaning of the Cross, the wood that was the Tree of Knowledge back in the Garden, the true cross which shows to ourselves the reality of living in three dimensional space, and here, on the cross itself, being in the present moment. The strength and power of the yoga pose leads to subtle changes in the mind, an alignment with that which could be represented in now ancient fresco art as the drawn mandala of the halo gold around the aligned head. The spine is straight, the energy centers of the chakras aligned. And yes, through this pose, we achieve being ourselves, and to be ourselves is to be, yes, in a certain way, kind, unselfish, concerned with the poor and the ill, or, as you might say, with the real issues of humanity and the human psyche. All the age old problems which will not go away, which will find their manifestation in history until history is bent by a higher of course non-violent mind.

Crucified, yes, but aren't we all crucified, in the sense of being incarnated as mortal beings bound in time and physicality and all its desires, needs, etc., creatures of flesh and blood and bone, which we, spiritual, must carry and care for, and arrange suitable lives for in society, even as far as careers and such. Not just a smile, a pretty face... The Stations of the Cross have their meaning, sure, not to offend the tradition, but does the image of so much gore bring across a power we might have within ourselves as well as, say, the tree, either pose, or tree appreciation while walking in the woods, deeply pondering the illusion of the boundary of self to the rest of the world...

(But even the old school masters who brought forth the image of tortured flesh, even those somehow explained themselves within the context of 'here was a happy man... even with such suffering,' because of fulfillment of beatitudes and the like...)

And oddly, it is the alignment, the proper straightening of the back, the movement back of the head upon the higher vertebrae so that the candle of the mind, the higher chakra of the third eye is lit, so that the energy from below might better flow upward... It is those things which, as far we can only know, our only sense of them, bring forth, which present, the possibility of the miracle. Remember, to Jesus Christ, the miracle was, how should I say, almost nonchalant, almost a matter of fact of ease to do. All one needed was faith, then one could, figuratively, make miracles of wine and walk on water, which is to say that there are already miracles within the nature of wine and within the nature of water, so why protest?

So how do people help you out? How do they help effect you in good ways? It's probably through some form of them finding their own cross to bear, a sort of sharing... hey, I've been through this...

The yoga pose must be some kind of universal awakening bestowed upon the individual. Maybe in the same way that porpoises and dolphins and manta rays and whales jump out of the water, a universal activity shared across each species, and they are no more automatons than we are; they are just freer to express their personality from being all that closer and involved, highly more so than we are, with nature, with nature's very fabric.

So the tree pose, the Cross of Christ, is like that, a kind of joyful entering into the calm of yoga, into the joyful leap, into that truer form of reality that we must psychologically encounter to feel we are in touch with everything.

You tell me. Go do Tai Chi, go do yoga. Can you not feel the awakening or the calm or the halo shining like light immediately, as light does, around you?

There are tales of Jesus' lost years of youth.... Did he follow the trade routes to India and Nepal and Tibet? It makes a certain amount of sense, from his calm, that he would have learned from the yogis....

How could He have been anything but a man of sorrows... For that, there is yoga.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Within the evanescent ethereal swirling tremulous-particle core of yoga practice there is the need for words, just as there is the need for the physical poses of muscle and limb and things within. And there is within the core of writing the true need to do yoga and read about it, in order to grasp things which are barely comprehensible at first try. How could one possibly make the leaps of faith and its poses that is raja yoga without the engagement and consideration?

"Sorry, I've been tending bar the last five nights," I explain to the woman at Glen's Market who's offering sample tastes of power bars. I stopped to look, shyly, at the offerings of such on the shelf next to her, hoping she wouldn't notice me, but she asks me if I'd like a taste. You don't want to talk to anyone very much after doing that, and 'ugh,' she understands completely. One of the guys I work with gets through the night with protein shakes and a steady stream of nibbles, sometimes onion tarts and escargot, eating them unhurriedly back by the bread cutting board in the middle of service. I've never given myself much a permission to do that, but there has to be a better way to do it, and the kid, who's studied kinesiology seems to have a scientifically based approach.

After tending bar five straight nights, I suppose the effects would be like that of hearing so many bird calls and sounds. There'd been a lot of cawing, a lot of chirps and songs. And my response was to get out the guitar and play some of the songs I knew. That somehow seemed like the right way to absorb all I'd heard, all the different personalities, shapes, faces, voices, walks of life, social and dining habits. I'd absorbed a certain amount, and it needed to come out.

I found the music I liked to have a shaman power to it, having its appeal to the raw blood coursing through the body like adrenaline, much like the effect The Beatles had when they came to America. And music with an ancient quality to it, rhythms one could sink his teeth into.

Some of us think like shaman, myself, a type O, for instance, and some people, type B, look upon what I'd naturally as an embarrassment. How does the O fit in comfortably with society that doesn't agree with his system very well? Self-embarrasssment? Isn't that what writers do? Think of Vonnegut, his breath smelling like mustard gas after boozing a bit calling his old war buddies late at night in Slaughtehouse Five.

In a way, I liked the job. I was well-suited for it, hospitality. And where I'd never fit in, for not being, oh, a decisive forceful type with a goal to impose, but rather instead a passive type, there it was, my job, of all things. I was a bartender. I liked talking to people, I liked helping them out. I was good at it, a performer, conversational, outdoing myself in ways that felt easy, providing good friendly service to random visitors. In that context, I liked wine, to an extent; like Jefferson, it seemed a necessity. I like people who also like wine. I like the conversations that come with wine, with the need for an exercise of humor. I liked hanging out. I liked restaurant people, I liked, at least almost liked, having my own rhythm, not that of the typical commute. I liked being a professional of the night, and took pride in it. Things can stressful, besides, and you need wine, and it is there for a good Godly reason.

The job was a good fit for the Celt, for the Type O in need of adrenaline's fire and the busy night. Often hard to accept, on a mental level, what I did for work, the hours, the pay, the oddness of it, for one who was once a college boy with ambitious of writing and teaching, but it was a good forum, for me, for lots of people. A shared venue. I wasn't selfish about it. One's own little version of Charlie Rose. The subject, life in general. Mortality. Talk itself.

And on the other hand, recovering from the week, I thought how it was all an incredible show, a shy interior person putting on a pose. Such by the end of the week, I kept to myself, the shyness back in large amount, the mind not sure what to think of anything, the mood depressed. I had a real palpable need to get back to yoga to straighten out the pains mental and physical, for the quiet of recovery. It was as if here was something I wanted to be doing, and I couldn't put my finger on it. And it seemed like I had piled so much crap on top of that which I wanted to be doing, and for so many years. But for such feelings, there was yoga and meditation.

Thanksgiving Day I woke up early after my shift, to drive up to see Mom. There are several points on Route 81 in the Pennsylvania land of ridges, curves and climbs where NPR is lost, where religious programming is the offering of the lower end of the FM dial. Where once a young man might have sort of sneered at is kitsch, or even dangerous to the mind, now I found it helpful. The reasons of why to have faith, how to have it, the importance of keeping it, have grown clearer over the years. Things to be grateful for, a good lesson.

Finding happiness with the simple things in life became clearer. It was good to have a job, health insurance, a place to live, good friends. The beauty in plain simple things suddenly seemed to offer itself up, even if I still was feeling stressed a bit, unclear as to the future.

And feeling grateful for what you have, just so as it is, that is something enormous.

But then, there's also that feeling of greatly missing something, of being on a completely different planet than that occupied by professional and practical people. Shane MacGowan is to me, sometimes, a sane man, because he went crazy. He created a persona as a way of hiding his sensitivity but also giving it a vehicle. For some of us, yes, to be whatever kind of an artist you can be as you go about functioning in the world, that's one way to do it.

I see life more and more determined by blood chemistry. The underlying difficulty of the excitable fight or flight response Type O human being, a shaman hunter, self-reliant, put into a world where one gets titles through a system of authority. Thus did Hemingway write, acknowledging a direct need for words, to be directly engaged in them. Which is different from the scholarly mode.

In the course of my life as an idiot, it seems I was too passive. Too thoughtful. Prone to confusion. I did not take what was offered, rightfully mine, out of a moral sense of proper conduct and my love for an awesome girl. I was too shy. I did not step up at the right time. I was too much a seeker of the order and meaning of the universe when it was right there before me. I failed to act at crucial moments, over and over again. Or was it that I had something ingrained within, physically, that was dictating things a bit. Did it have something to do with the real but unmet unaddressed need for the spirituality of yoga, which in turn would be a better gateway toward beliefs, just as one might suspect that Jesus was a yogi in practice, thus his ability to put things into words.

There are the rough drafts, left lingering, to be recorded, I suppose, but then transcended, moved on from, to be understood by a place beyond normal understandings.

There I am sitting on the carpeted floor of the music auditorium during the last class of the anthropology class Deviancy, and she is seated up the same row, mid way up, conspicuous. And what did I do? How easy it would have been to go sit next to her. What a nice way it would have been to smooth over the little differences that had grown up large in the back and forth of courting. And how much it would cost me, that passivity... And it was Christmastime. I was a senior, she was a sophomore. One more golden opportunity, missed.From there things seemed to fall apart somewhat. I kept losing units of self-confidence and assuredness. I kept losing the push to follow through with that bright friendly kid who came to college and how he could be a teacher. And instead of that path, it seemed like I just got crazier, fancying myself as the writer, coming to town, temping, busing tables...And every morning, I'd wake up to the thoughts of how I messed it up with her, replaying in them in my mind, and each time the same frustrated end. Sort of like feeling gaslighted, as in the old movie with Ingrid Bergman. O adrenal system.

When I slept enough that I fell into dream, then I could deal with it. Then I wasn't so much haunted by all my foolishness, the countless social errors I made with regard to college in general.

About Me

Gandhi tells us to be the change we want to see in the world. I wanted to see a blog on writing. Not necessarily the craft stuff, the things you could learn in a classroom, but the basic matters (and mysteries) of creativity, depth and subject matter.
I am a veteran barman of Washington, DC. My novel, A Hero For Our Time, a modern retelling of Hamlet, is available on Amazon.com. (My thanks to Mr. Lermontov, God rest his soul, for allowing me to nod to his singular classic.)
What makes writing literature? Writing will always be an art form to honor.